I’ve heard it many times, but is it true? I’ve made it my latest mission to find out. Raiding the few ingredients in my food box, I came up with the following recipe to see if I could find the limit on garlic:
Saute in 1 sprig thyme, 4 medium carrots diced, and 2 large onions diced until soft. +7 cloves garlic finely chopped, saute 2-3 mins. +1 can chopped tomatoes, 1 cube veggie stock. Simmer. Serve with pasta.
As it turns out, 7 cloves of garlic is not too much at all as I really enjoyed this meal. It was kind of sweet and I’m not sure if that was more due to the garlic or the carrots. The next day I decided to cook up a whole head of garlic. It was similar to the recipe above but with courgettes instead of carrots, and add 3 marinated chicken breasts and 4 large mushrooms. It was only after eating it that I realised that though I put more garlic in, there was more of everything else, so percentage wise, there was actually less garlic.
This time when I ate the meal I felt like less garlic would’ve been better. It just didn’t seem to go with the rest of the ingredients. In the first recipe, garlic was the feature ingredient, but in this one I’m not sure if it was garlic or chicken or mushrooms.
So I guess the moral of the story is that there is such a thing as too much garlic and the amount depends on the context of the dish. For some dishes, any garlic at all it too much, but for others it’s never enough.